Reading the Tea Leaves

Tea Education, Consultancy, and Tastings

Archive for Category : Puer

This tisane, named Christmas tea by the manufacturer is a fruit infusion, warmed with cinnamon and cardamom in time for the season. The cup, as you can see, is a cheery red. Alas, there is no tea in the blend. Looking back over the preceding months, a few teas stand out. The recent arrival of [...]

From about the end of March each year, samples from the new tea season begin to arrive. Tasting can be rushed, as the numbers grow. One morning in April I remember my colleague and I tasted 35 Green teas. In some instances, decision-making is just a matter of finding the best tasting tea and best [...]

This is the last, for now, in a series about Puer aged teas. The two words say it all. The buzz surrounding White tea continues unabated. Health claims aside, the teas in this category, for the most part, do qualify as the least processed. As for Puer, the bubble may have burst a couple of years ago, but [...]

The previous post described cooked and uncooked varieties of Puer. Here, I focus on the processing of compressed Puer teas. (As I have mentioned elsewhere, photos of the processing in Yunnan were lost when the camera was stolen.) On one trip to Yunnan in southwestern China, during a tea tasting session at a teahouse in [...]

With an anthropology background, how would it have been possible not to think of Levi-Strauss’s “The Raw and the Cooked” when learning about Puer tea? Of all the teas lumped together under the Special Teas category, Puer perhaps holds the most special place. Dark, spidery looking leaves brew a dense cup with that distinctive and [...]